Website Planning:Part Two:Who is your target audience?
Website Planning
Welcome back to the website planning series, previously we discussed the importance of creating goals.
In this segment, we will discuss the importance of understanding your target audience.
What is a target audience?
In the world of marketing and advertising, a target audience is where marketers or advertisers aim their products and services at potential customers in order to make sales. For each product and service there are obviously different types of people that will be interested in your niche.
The target audience are the people that are potentially going to purchase your products and services. The more you understand the needs and wants of your target market, the more likely your website will be a success.
Website Planning Exercise One
Ask yourself as many questions about your targeted market as possible including:
- How old are they?
- What types of disposable income do they have?
- Where do they live?
- How often do they use the Internet?
- What levels of computer skills do they have?
- What are their hobbies?
- Is your target market mostly male or female?
- What other websites do they use?
- How much time do they spend online?
- What level of education do they have?
- What are your target audience searching for?
- Where currently is my target audience going for their products and services?
Once you have the answers to these questions. You can understand the needs and wants of your target audience. Indeed, this is a very powerful position to be in. It is smarter to have the answers before, devoting lots of time into creating a website.
Website Planning Methods of research
Whilst conducting research it is important to focus on finding quality methods of research. One of the best methods is speaking to your target audience, conduct survey and interview your target audience. From previous experience a discussion with your target audience provides in depth analysis that you will not get from a tick box survey.
After you’ve gathered the research from your target audience, you’ll be able to make some clear decisions on what your target market wants or needs. We need to decide what we are going to do with this information.
The purpose of the website is to serve the needs of our target audience. Our target market is the bloodline of a successful site.
Serve your target audience
Your priority is to serve your target audience. Give the target audience what they want, plus give them reason to visit your site again. In any business or company it is important to serve our target market, but be creative and unique. Creativity and being unique will help you as you begin to build an online community. Look at your competitors and see what you they offer their customers and how you can be unique plus provide a better service. Look for ways to improve your service.
Facebook and Myspace
A great example of taking an idea and improving it has to be Myspace and Facebook. Myspace appeared as a social networking site in 2003. Myspace a global network with over 100 million users, where people can create personal blogs, add music, videos and photos to their Myspace accounts.
In 2004, Facebook came along and is the world’s most popular social media network. The reason being is that Facebook is much more popular is they created a far much superior social network site. Facebook offers interactive features and applications that we were not included in Myspace. In this example, you don’t always need an original idea. You need to do it better in order to be a success.
The most effective method of gaining visits is creating a useful website that is updated on a regular basis at a bare minimum once a week. Create information that will serve your audience, supply your audience with useful articles. A useful resource that is full of resourceful information will be used again and again by your audience.
If your website is based on Rock Climbing for example, write information that will be relevant to the target audience. Discuss some of the best rock climbing areas in your region or country. Discuss your experiences with rock climbing, place photographs or videos about climbing that you’ve created, talk about the buying rock climbing equipment and where to buy it.
One of the best ideas for a certain topic is to start a beginner’s guide. An example if you niche is body building write a beginners guide to body building. This information will always be handy to someone plus it will serve as a great resource for your website.
